FSM has an article about improvements coming our way in X.org. "There's more coming our way than 'mere' graphical goodness: Xorg developers are about to unleash upon us more performance and ease of use than X ever knew before. Not only that, the work being done now will allow older hardware to perform better and new hardware to be supported faster."

Whow! xorg.conf is gone! Thank god! The horrors i had with that file. Maybe there is hope afterall.

As long as the autodetection works properly, a fine situation. BUT in many settings, usually such involving hardware that's not up to date, it can be required to make settings through xorg.conf in order to get a working system.

My home system is such a case. Autodetection leads to completely stupid screen width and height (it's a 21" Eizo CRT). In older XFree86, everything worked fine, but X.org required some additional settings. The xorg.conf file was the only reason I got a running X again.

With the rise of HAL and DBUS, xorg.conf has furthermore lost the control over things like keyboard language settings (X-wide, not just regarding KDE or Gnome).

The great deal of not having to use xorg.conf is its use on live system CDs or bootable USB drives. It's not needed anymore to run detection means across the graphics hardware in order to compose a xorg.conf file.